If someone is 63 years old in 2024 (I know this story was realized before, but let's do the math together), this means William must have been born in 1961 or earlier than that. Melanie is about to be 23 years old, meaning she was born at the beginning of either 2000 or 2001. This is an age gap of 41 years which can be extremely challenging for young adults to accept later once William is not able to take care of himself due to his age. However, what impacted me the most was not how old William is, but that he is older than Ballinger himself and that is concerning to me as the reader and for him as a father. However, Ballinger did not do such a great job trying to understand Melanie’s situation and quickly decided to drown her with questions, doubts, and preoccupations that she probably had already thought about me, and Melanie may not be ready to speak about it now.

In this section, I noticed the dynamic both Ballinger and Melanie have is very odd, especially the way she assumes telling her father about her significant other when the truth is the contrary. By the beginning of the conversation, we can already see that Melanie and Ballinger have a close relationship with each other, but Melanie seems to have grown distant from her family and made some choices she knew her parents would not be proud of once she told them the truth. However, she has an idea; she can start the conversation by slowly introducing her father Coombs by talking a little bit more about him and quickly assuming they already had this conversation before which does not give her father the chance to think properly about the situation except to accept it. That strategy did not work for long once her father started to figure out how serious her relationship was with Coombs as well as how impossible it was to share Melanie his problems with his wife, Mary. Ballinger and Melanie seemed to have a close relationship with each other, but this situation may drift the, away for a long time.

Here is when the conflict of the story starts to grow, when Melanie decides to confess to her father the age gap between her and her fiancée and how Ballinger tries to find a way to tell his daughter about his temporary separation from his wife, Mary. However, Melanie's situation seemed greater than his problem at the end of the story, so he decided to not tell her what he wanted to tell her before and just tried to analyze what just happened during his conversation with her. Meanwhile, poor Mary has no idea what kind of problem her daughter has gotten into while she is happily gardening in her front yard, ignorant of the whole situation. Although Ballinger and Mary were planning to get separated for quite some time, they seemed to have mutual respect and their interactions with each other were friendly but not romantic. Will Melanie’s situation help both Ballinger and Mary be closer to each other if they try to find a way to help their daughter or will it just worsen their marriage in the end?